APPENDIX B

POLICY FUND - (Extract from Report to Executive Member on 1 July 2004)

The Policy Fund has been supplemented by retaining £305,000 of the non pay inflation allocation to Recreation and Heritage services to allow a wider range of initiatives to be supported. Further transfers totalling £238,000 have been made from the Policy Fund to service budgets to reflect permanent commitments in support of ICT infrastructure improvements. The total amount available in the Policy Fund in 2004/05 is therefore £1,000,000.

Allocation of the Policy Fund in 2004/05

Projects in the Policy Fund are grouped under the four headings of expanding the user base, innovation and quality, market development and staff development. These link back to the management objectives approved for the services in May 2002. In 2004/05 the emphasis will be to use the Policy Fund to support projects aimed at expanding the user base of the Recreation and Heritage services.

The provisional allocation of the £1,000,000 across the four headings is as follows:

Expanding the user base (£842,000)

Within this heading the major allocations support the "Creative Hampshire" programme (£125,000), developments in the Library and Information Service including extending library opening hours (£135,000), joint working with education on sport, adult learning and youth outreach (£125,000) and a major events programme (£60,000). The remainder includes increased design and marketing capacity to support Discovery Centres, a dedicated press and publicity resource, expansion of the Trailblazers programme, funding to support work with young people in Andover and a number of other smaller projects designed to attract new users and increase usage. £61,000 will be held back at this stage to meet any need to increase grant allocations in line with inflation.

Innovation and quality (£111,000)

This includes an allocation to the Countryside Service for the definitive rights of way map review team (£50,000) and an expansion of the implementation team (£21,000), which delivers a wide range of small scale maintenance and improvement projects across all Recreation and Heritage services. There will also be continuing support for ICT development, including the completion of the archive cataloguing project.

Market development (£10,000)

This allocation will fund further research work in support of service developments.

Staff Development (£37,000)

This allocation supports actions flowing from the Departmental training and development plan. The particular emphasis this year will be on Health and Safety, customer care, the staff induction programme, equalities issues and the corporate leadership development programme.